IntelliJ and React which IDE/Texteditor should I choose - reactjs

I am going to develop a web application with React and want know which IDE/Text Editor would fit best.
IntelliJ IDEA for example supports the framework as well as WebStorm. And now I want to know if there are differences between the support of the editors as well as the benefits for implementing with one of these 2 IDEs.
As I am familiar with IDEA I would use it, if there is no important or nice feature missing compared to WebStorm.

WebStorms features are a subset of IntelliJ IDEAs. You won't miss any that might come with WebStorm and AFAIK IntelliJ will always ship new features (updates) at the same time (or even before) WebStorm.
Further reading:
Can IntelliJ IDEA encapsulate all of the functionality of Webstorm and PHPStorm through plugins?
https://intellij-support.jetbrains.com/hc/en-us/community/posts/207461065-IntelliJ-Idea-Ultimate-vs-WebStorm

Related

Why use create-react-app when I can just use react in the browser?

I want to use react/redux. So I did "create-react-app test" after 5 minutes, I get a directory with 22,538 files and takes 131MB.
Meanwhile if I google, "jsfiddle react redux" and look at the first link I get a jsfiddle with just a few files it loads, all within the browser.
So why should I use create-react-app versus just loading a few dependencies in the browser? Is the overhead worth it? Is it mainly due to webpack?
I use create react app (CRA from now on) since react redux has too much boilerplate to manage things.
CRA is basically a startup-kit: that explains why has so much basic package asset in terms of import.
I can assure you that maybe you'll pay the cost to use redux on large projects (and dependencies...and packaging!!!).
Mostly depends on teams anyways, if you need to standardize how to operate on things and your team is large, Redux should be useful since this way of act avoids unexpected implementations because "there's a way" to do things.
my personal preference is not to use CRA. it was meant to be a starter kit for developers who want to learn react without wasting time on configuration and setting up the environment.
It is a fantastic learning tool if you start from scratch because all the magic is hidden from your view, you just focus on React and let cra take care of the details. but production projects are not that simple to handle. there are a lot of requirements which may come in and your cra may not support it. as it was meant to be a generic tool for learning react. you can eject it but then you should really avoid ejecting it as the config is extremely complicated.
with cra you are missing a very important base of your project. ie the webpack.
The way cra solves this problem is by hiding all the config by default, so after starting your project you are not exposed to Babel, Webpack, dev/prod environment, or any other config.
You start learning with a tool that does everything for you, but when you are ready to know how things really work under all that, what are you supposed to do?
With cra you have an eject script that can uncover all the config that is hidden beneath.
If you feel so adventurous to do it, you will find yourself into a really huge and scary config, meant to do a lot of stuff and designed to not be exposed to the end user.
if you are a senior developer then you must really try to configure your own webpack config according to your project requirement. webpack, babel, etc are very important because they are not just for react. you can use them in any modern javascript project. as a senior developer, you should really know how things are working, in case you decide to remove a library and add another you should know where and how to do it. and really should not rely on a tool that makes things simple for u.
All of this is not a hard rule to follow. but my personal experience .

AngularJS 2.1.0 official scaffold & style?

Google knows best… but they're inconsistent!
The official ng CLI generates a scaffold one way, whereas the official tutorial chooses a different way.
I'm not talking just directory layout, typings.json vs types in package.json choices are also particularly worrisome.
What style am I meant to work with?
Angular 2's tutorial basically just shows the quickest and easiest way to get up and running with the framework. It omits mentioning things that could scare away a potential newcomer to the ecosystem, it is meant to be simple.
angular-cli on the other hand actively incorporates best practices, latest technologies like Webpack 2 Beta and tries to give developers a piece of software to quickly scaffold and develop scalable production apps without worrying about build-tools and configuration.
QuickStart
This is not the perfect arrangement for your application. It is not designed for production. It exists primarily to get you started quickly with learning and prototyping in Angular
angular/quickstart/README.md
angular-cli
The Angular2 CLI makes it easy to create an application that already works, right out of the box. It already follows our best practices!
https://cli.angular.io
See also: https://angular.io/styleguide

Automated Accessibilty Testing Tools For Angular SPAs

I am wondering if anyone has experience with an automated accessibility testing tool for Angular Single Page Applications (SPA).
I have tried pa11y and it does not seem to be working consistently. Just wondering if there are any other tools out there which are comparable to pa11y in ease of use, but which work with Angular.
#Estus raised a good point in the comment — "does not seem to be working consistently" is not a lot to go on. Regardless, a couple options:
Take a look at protractor-accessibility-plugin for NPM which can lean on the Chrome Accessibility Developer Tools or Tenon.
Related, there is a tutorial on using Tenon as a Grunt task.
Level Access offers an implementation example of Continuum called 'Continuum for Protractor' that might be a good place to get started. It's available for free at webaccessibility.com. You can use it as a template or as a reference to integrate automated accessibility testing into your existing Protractor tests. Here's some more information if you're interested. I also help maintain Continuum Explorer, which is a free extension for Google Chrome that is framework-agnostic and more interactive if you think that might be a better match for your use case.

Developing and debugging Sencha apps without sencha's paid services

I started working with sample sencha apps. I find it really hard to find typo and errors in my code.
I added the eclipse plugin for auto-complete during coding. Buts its a trial version just like the sencha architect. Am really confused on how the sencha app should be developed.
I want to know the tools that sencha developers are using so that I can deploy and debug effeciently.
Thanks in advance.
The workflow / tools choice when developing an application is a subjective matter so I'm going to talk about my experience, having been a Sencha Touch developer for the last year.
I find it really hard to find typo and errors in my code.
...
Am really confused on how the sencha app should be developed.
This is not a matter of tools in my opinion. Sencha Touch has an unavoidable steep learning curve. You should start with simple examples, and you could ask here when you have specific programming issues (I personally found Sencha Touch forums less useful than stackoverflow).
The most important thing is understanding the basics concepts:
Sencha Touch class system (http://www.sencha.com/learn/sencha-class-system),
How Sencha implements MVC (http://docs.sencha.com/touch/2.2.1/#!/guide/controllers)
(http://docs.sencha.com/touch/2.2.1/#!/guide/views),
Sencha Touch Layouts (http://docs.sencha.com/touch/2.2.1/#!/guide/layouts),
Sencha Touch Components (http://docs.sencha.com/touch/2.2.1/#!/guide/components)
Also all of these guides will be very useful, make sure you understand them and learn to use Sencha Docs, which definetely has some obscure, non explained properties, but should still be your main resource when developing a Sencha Touch app.
Debugging will always be tricky, unfortunately sometimes setting the wrong property on a Component, or misunderstanding how a Component is meant to work, ends up with some obscure var is not defined error. Do not fear to check Sencha Touch source code when this happens, code is well written and usually easy to understand.
Here the tools to use are again Sencha Touch Docs (when hovering on a class title you can examine directly its source code, plus your browser debugging console. Use frequent console.debug() messages, and when something weird happens inside framework classes stop execution with debugger; and step inside source code).
Now back to your question: I have been using the following tools:
NetBeans,
Chrome DevTools,
Chrome Ripple Extension,
Sencha Command (optional)
Compass CSS authoring framework
a couple shell scripts
The IDE is a matter of personal choice, Netbeans has some nice Javascript suggestions: it highlights variables when they are used but not defined in the current scope, or defined but not used, which really helps a lot against typos. It is very heavy in terms of memory usage. I guess Eclipse, or even a lighter one could be equally good.
Chrome is kinda a forced choice if you are on Windows, their DevTools are excellent, make sure you master them, they will be your main working tools. Once again: lot of RAM helps.
Ripple is an invaluable extension that allows you to test your mobile app on different devices and if you are using Phonegap for native deployment it emulates a part of its API on the browser.
Compass is the tool suggested by Sencha to compile their sass files. There is a detailed tutorial on how to setup compass on Sencha Docs.
I have been using Sencha Command but it's not strictly necessary, if you don't care about resources minification (but you should) you will not miss much about it. If you are developing a native app you can make up for the lack of Sencha Command deploy function with a simple shell script that copies html/js/css resources to the assets folder of your Phonegap project.
Another script activates automatically compass watch on the /resources/sass folder at startup, to avoid having to manually do that each time.
Just my two cents, hope it helps.
Anubis covered majority of the bee knees in hand coding Sencha Touch.
I'd like to add a couple more cents into the kitty.
My personal preference for IDE is Sublime Text. Searching through entire projects of code for anything, I've not seen an equal for effectiveness and speed. You can customise everything - especially colours and keybindings. It also has a ludicrous wealth of plugins, including working in correlation to Chrome, as well as Github.
SENCHA GUIDES
Miami Coder Tutorials - great collection of practical tutorials which will help you understand development patterns faster than most other guides. Great for starters.
Figleaf Training can be a little unconventional, but a great free means of learning Sencha Touch and almost everything it is capable of. Great for starters too.
Druck IT - solid collection of guides and ST information. Has links to many other useful sites such as these listed.
Mitchell Simoens - Mitchell is Sencha staff, a quality coder, and his site has some great advice and snippets to help learn. This is where you'll truly learn how to code ST well. Helps towards getting a grasp, but mainly for mid+ knowledge.
Ladysign - one of the Sencha Trainers. Has content that clears up "how to" in many facets other sites and books never even mention. Quality information. This info will get you above basic and flesh out your knowledge and understanding.
Modus Create - Jay Garcia is one of the devs of ST. Modus Create is his enterprise, which contains some useful guides within the blog.
Custom Font Icons - complete guide for 2.2. Very useful.
There's a few other sites that were incredible sources of tidbits through to information on how to code ST professionally. These links above will help immensely though. Above all, read the source code. It is very well documented, as well as being an example in itself of how to use the code. I have learnt ludicrous amounts this way.
GRUNT (with NPM/Node.js)!
Use Grunt! This will automate the vast majority of what you want to do. For example, typing "grunt" in the command line could jshint/jslint your code, concatenate all .js files together, all css files together (including all the compass joy), obfuscate, compress, run a comprehensive set of unit tests (especially Phantom), output to desired location, then add a cherry on top by refreshing your browser window. Add in the grunt watch plugin, and it'll do that every time a file is saved in defined directories. Any bugs in your code - you get accurate specific line numbers where it is broken.
The beauty of grunt is extended by optional alternate commandlines for different tasks. Also, you can specify in the package.json file of a few kB the precise list of plugins you wish to use with the gruntfile you've created, saving megabytes of file transfer. NPM can process that file, and download and install all that is required to operate. Makes for fast setup on another computer.
Side note: Touch Node has come of age. This permits all ST's class structure to develop your serverside javascript.
Want to include Sencha Cmd?
Sencha Cmd (finally) does do a decent job of collecting only the dependent classes from the full library.
grunt-sencha-build
grunt-senchacmd
Alternative for Sencha Cmd
Extend Grunt with Matt Goldspink's grunt-sencha-dependencies which works for both ST and ExtJS, or use grunt-sencha-resolver - this latter one I haven't used.

Making development with Ext JS fast

Ext JS is a nice framework for web UI, but I found that building and putting stuff together takes a long time and painfully slow.
This might be a general problem when working with JavaScript, but does anybody have any way to speed things up?
What can I use? Better IDE with good JavaScript suppport? GUI designers? Code generators?
I need some way to speed up common things like building grids and forms but yet let me do complex things like creating custom components easily.
I'm using ASP.NET MVC. Coolite seems nice at first, but I feel that I'll be having trouble when creating any custom components later on.
There's always Ext GWT, which lets you use Eclipse tooling (and all of the advantages that gives you, such as refactoring, swift code navigation, etc.) to create your Ext/JavaScript app.
When you download the ExtJs library, you find lot of sample applications for common requirements like Grid panel, forms, form elements etc.
Regarding IDEs, you dont find mature productive tools, but check the below link and wish it could be of help to you
http://www.extjs.com/blog/2008/02/01/ides-plugins-and-tools-for-ext-js-20/
But if you really wish to develop custom components, you need to get through knowledge,start approaching with ExtJs-provided sample apps.
If you want to get faster at anything, practice it until you fully understand how it works and how to make it do what you want. If you are just starting out, why would expect to be able to work as quickly as you do when you are working on something that you are very familiar with?
Things I use to make ExtJS less painful
Chrome, for it's developer tools, or Firefox with Firebug.
snipMate: snippets for Vim, so I can quickly produce boiler plate code for classes.
JSLint as a command line tool. Especially good for detecting rogue commas.
Sencha forums.
ExtJS IRC chat (Server: irc.freenode.net Room: #extjs).
API documentation.
Sencha and Saki's ExtJS examples.
Beer.
ExtJS is building a designer right know so you can look forward it, the only problem I think is not gonna be free.
you can see a video demo there, in term of release date I think this is due to the first quarter of this year.
I say learn the framework. But to develop apps, I use IntelliJ IDEA, which has partial code completion, etc. It costs money though.
Once you have some practice and understanding of how ExtJS works, you'll get faster at it. By using the examples for reference, and building up my application in small pieces, I've gotten much better (and faster) at developing stuff with ExtJS. A great way to get started is to find an example (or two) that kind of do what you need, and modify (or combine) them to see how they work together.

Resources